How to *actually* heal from anxiety…

A question I hear from clients all the time is “I know that I have to heal, but HOW do I do it?!”

We hear time and time again from our followers that they’ve gone to therapy, read every self-help book they can get their hands on, meditated and mantra-ed endlessly, but they still can’t seem to shift the sticky behaviors of anxiety. 

They’ve been told “just change your behaviors, and then you won’t feel anxious anymore.” But guess what…Trying to change behaviors and patterns and get a different outcome when you keep getting triggered is really, really hard.

This is what we call body/mind incongruence - when you’re trying to just force a new behavior and it feels so incongruent because internally you’re actively triggered. You try to force yourself to do something new, but your trauma physiology takes over anyway, and you end up feeling guilty for not ‘just changing your behaviors’, and shame yourself and your healing.

This is not how we heal sustainably. 

I want to walk you through what is needed, conceptually, to heal. Hearing the concepts doesn’t replace the work - but my hope is that this can give you some insight into how to create lasting change in your life, instead of just muscling your way through painful, unsustainable changes. 

Firstly, we need to understand that changing our behaviors is a RESULT of healing. It’s a natural byproduct of healing. As we heal from the inside out - exploring your current relationship to your emotions, identifying what’s happening in your nervous system that’s leading to the anxious patterns, and healing the wounds and shame stories that are maintaining these patterns - our behavior will naturally begin to shift.

1. The first step to healing is awareness.

Did you know that your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are driven by your nervous system state? The behaviors we so desperately want to change - compulsions, controlling our partner, nitpicking, trying to control our environment, lashing out - are simply the manifestation of a dysregulated nervous system.

We can look at our behaviors, thoughts, or emotions as an inroad to awareness of what’s going on INSIDE. 

Ask yourself: Am I constantly in fight or flight? Am I going into freeze, numbing, shutdown, disconnection? 

Having awareness of what’s actually going on inside your body that is driving these behaviors, thoughts, and emotions is the first step in starting the process of healing. 

2. Then we lean into curiosity 

So many people come into this work just wanting to solve something, but curiosity is equally as important as awareness and change.

You’ve begun to identify what nervous system state you tend to experience, now ask yourself: What is this nervous system state driven by? Is this reaction rooted in something old? Is it rooted in past trauma or pain? Is it rooted in subconscious beliefs about myself? Is this rooted in the actual here and now? Is this an accurate nervous system response to something that’s happening in the present moment, or is this rooted in something old? 

This is an ongoing, evolving process of being curious - we’re not going to get all of the answers at once, but starting to develop a curious relationship with the reactions in your body will set you on the path to shifting your current relationship with these emotions.

3. Learning to be WITH all of our emotions and sensations

Our nervous system state manifests as certain sensations in our body. We must learn to be with, and feel safe in, the whole of our emotional experience if we want to create change that is rooted in compassion and trust, versus avoidance and fear. 

Now start to ask: Am I open to learning how to be with the sensations, to tolerate discomfort, to expand my ability to be with the emotions and create space between the sensation in the body and the reaction (behavior, mental interpretation)? Can I learn to feel a little bit safer with what’s happening in my body?

4. Then we can use the body to regulate and transform our internal experience 

When the sensations and emotions in your body begin to feel unsafe or intolerable, we need to learn how to regulate our nervous system. We need to learn how to alchemize and metabolize the emotional energy in our body, so that we no longer feel like prisoners to our emotions.

So what does this look like in practice?

Here’s what happens every time we start this process with clients: Their mind comes in and hijacks the process. The mind comes in and immediately starts making stories and interpretations about what these sensations mean. We’ve learned to escape our body and stay with the mind because somewhere along the way we learned that being in the body was unsafe - the feelings were too much, they were overwhelming, or we’ve learned that certain emotions are wrong and bad and we “shouldn’t” be feeling them.

This is where we start to feel a lot of resistance. As we learn to submerge ourselves in our own inner world (the world of sensation) - the mind wants answers, the mind wants to figure it out, the mind wants to label and judge and make meaning out of what’s happening. 

This is why it’s so important to have a practitioner who’s skilled in somatic work. 

We’re going to be with you in this process as the resistance comes up. We’re going to use our own bodies to coregulate and help you come back into your body and the present moment. We’re going to be with you in the discomfort so that it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and scary, and so we can redirect you back into your body and the here and now as we witness the mind doing all of the things that the mind does. And instead of your believing the mind - you’re able to be an impartial witness of what’s happening in your mind and create some space between you and your thoughts. 

As you learn to be with emotion and sensation without the mind hijacking the experience constantly, then we begin to delve into the body - which holds and stores the unconscious - the unconscious begins to become conscious and we can recognize “oh, this is a fear from an experience in childhood”, or “this is actually this subconscious belief that I’ve held about my sense of worth or identity”. 

Then we process that pain, and allow it to resolve through the body. This might look like grieving and moving grief through your body; This might look like holding your inner child; This might look like finally expressing anger and outrage at what happened to you or what you were taught about yourself; This might look like finally meeting the parts of you that you learned were unworthy with love and acceptance. 

This is feeling a VISCERAL shift and a corrective emotional experience of that.

Once we address these core pains, wounds, and beliefs, then those protective mechanisms of the nervous system (fight, flight, freeze) are no longer needed because we’ve metabolized that pain. We shifted that unconscious belief and the stories that have been living in your body for decades. This is where we shift from the inside out.

This is highly nuanced and unique to each individual, and that’s why a blog post or email could never do the healing for you. Just hearing or reading these concepts will not replace you meeting your grief, you meeting your inner child, you sitting with the discomfort in your body. The conceptual understanding and the actual experiential implementation are vastly different. 

Healing is not about knowing things - it’s about experiencing things, practicing things, and having new experiences in your body. New experiences in your nervous system, so your nervous system learns to feel safe. 

It’s safe to be myself, it’s safe to love, it’s safe to take risks, it’s safe to be in my body.

And as a result of all these things: your behaviors naturally change. If your behaviors are rooted in this discomfort and pain that’s living in your body and it’s manifesting as these protective mechanisms, the behaviors are going to change as you allow yourself to process and integrate that pain.

If our behaviors are driven by our subconscious and our nervous system state…then if we change our subconscious and our nervous system state, the behaviors will naturally change as a result. You don’t have to force it.

If you’re ready to start creating these shifts from the inside out, and learn to ACTUALLY heal your anxiety (instead of just managing symptoms for the rest of your life) - apply to work with us HERE. We cannot wait to support you. Let’s do the damn thing!!!